Mani Feniger is an author, therapist, and inspirational speaker. Her popular and practical book Journey from Anxiety to Freedom (Prima 1997) has helped thousands of people find the tools to reclaim their lives. She has also been a consultant for several documentary films including Breaking Silence (1985) and The Camino Documentary, which will be aired on PBS next year.
She will be presenting her new book, The Woman in the Photograph
AUTHOR EVENT AND BOOK SIGNING, THURSDAY, JUNE 21 7:30 (free)
at Pegasus Books 1855 Solano Ave in North Berkeley.
For information about her book, read her blog, see upcoming book events,
and order The Woman in the Photograph, visit her website.
This interview includes questions and answers about the writing of The Woman in the Photograph…The Search For My Mother’s Past.
1. What motivated you to write this story about your mother?
I loved my mother very much and felt close to her, especially after my father died when I was eight. However, the way this closeness played out was that she treated me as her confidant, and turned to me to share her pain and her frustration. When she passed away in 1987, I believed our relationship was over. Then, many years later, I found a photograph of my mother and her sister taken in Germany just before Hitler became Chancellor. I realized my mother once lead a whole life I knew nothing about. I felt a great urgency to find out whom the woman in the photograph was, before she became the pragmatic, cynical, sometimes bitter woman I knew.
2. What obstacles or challenges did you come up against while writing?
My prior book, Journey from Anxiety to Freedom, was a self-help book and the information had an inherent structure. This book is a memoir and it is fueled by strong emotions. I sat for hours at my computer letting all my images and feelings flow onto the page and often found myself weeping, or laughing, or going off on a related memory of my own. But “The Woman in the Photograph” is not a journal. I had to go back many times and revise the material to keep the flow of the story, often called the arc of the narrative. There is a delicate balance between the writer’s private relationship to the subject and the process of creating an art form you can share with others.
3. I understand there was a lot of research undertaken to complete the story.
Can you say something about that?
By the time I embarked on my search, I had only two family members knew anything about my mother’s past. Fortunately, I visited them in the early ‘90s, because neither of them is still alive today. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, a whole chapter of my mother’s past was opened up to me. Her history included a property in Leipzig, Germany that was stolen by the Nazis in 1935, and then restored to me fifty years later. The sale of that property allowed me to buy our home here in El Cerrito. There were also several strangers, including a young man in Germany, who heard of my search and came forward to help me in ways I never imagined.
4. What joyful discoveries did you find in writing this book?
What a perfect question, because in fact the process did bring me joy. I found a photo album my mother had put together in her youth, but never showed me. It told me, in her own handwriting, of the joyful, luxurious, adventurous life she once led. The things I learned helped me realize that my mother’s life had suffering but it also had joy. I had a better understanding of my mother’s choices, and my discoveries made it possible for me to make choices my mother couldn’t, or didn’t make.
5. What did you learn about yourself through the telling of this story?
I have always thought of myself as a mostly positive person, but I began to realize how much of my mother’s discouragement and broken expectations I had absorbed. I had an edge of “Why bother trying. You lose it all anyway.” I don’t mean that in the Buddhist sense of impermanence. It was more a fear of success, and an unwillingness to dream of possibilities. This book, which took me twenty years, is proof that I no longer think that way.
6. What would you do differently next time?
No answer comes to mind. It really took that long to gestate and become clear. The published version that will be available in June is really the fourth draft. I needed to say everything without editing or censoring, and then I needed to “let some of my darlings go” as one writing coach advised. Some of my favorite lines didn’t further the story and I cut them out for the greater good.
7. Do you have any advice for new writers?
Write, write, and write. We think of writing as solitary but it needs airing out and witnessing. Read your writing out loud to someone else. Find a writing group, or a memoir group, or go to meeting of the California Writers Club or the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association.
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Mani Feniger"The Woman in the Photograph"
